Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose

by Constance Hale

consult http://​hotword.​dictionary.​com/​berries,

The first step in learning how to write evocative scenes is to increase your powers of observation. First, really look. Then start taking notes. Write down everything. Draw shapes. Note colors. Find new, more precise words.

Your own desk might not be such a “godawful mess” (his words), but look at it closely and describe what you see. Make your description more than a mere catalog.

Go sit somewhere distinctive—a favorite garden, a cathedral, or even a grungy inner-city laundromat—and notice what is special or evocative about the place. Use concrete, vivid nouns to paint a picture of the scene. Carefully choose a few idea/feeling/abstraction nouns to convey what makes the place unusual. Is it a microcosm of something larger?

Find a historical description of a particular place in your city, town, or county. Retrace the author’s steps. Write your own description of the place as it is today, using the original as a starting

point but letting John McPhee inspire you to see the essence of the place today.

They stand in willingly when nouns don’t want to hang around sounding repetitive. The noun (or noun phrase), whose bidding the pronoun does, is called the antecedent—because it goes (ced-) before (ante-) the pronoun in the sentence or paragraph.

the list of pronouns is finite and predictable, subdividing neatly and changed only slightly since the days of Shakespeare:

Personal pronouns might be the subject of a

sentence (I, you, he, she, it, we, they) or the object (me, you, him, it, us, them):

Certain personal pronouns (my, your, his, her, its, our, their) act as adjectives, since in indicating...

Demonstrative pronouns (this, that, these, those) direct attention to another word or phrase. They can be nouns:

They can be adjectives:

Relative pronouns (that, what, whatever, which, whichever, who, whoever, whom, whomever, whose) introduce a clause that wants to hitch itself firmly to its antecedent:

The antecedent can be a noun, a phrase, a clause, or a sentence,

Sometimes the antecedent is even a whole paragraph.

Indefinite pronouns (all, another, any, anybody, anything, both, each, either, every, everybody, everyone, everything, few, many, most, much,

neither, no one, nobody, none, one, several, some, somebody, someone, something, such) also stand in for people or things, but not necessarily o...

Indefinite pronouns move around sentences with abandon and can also play the role of adjectives. (Take care to see indefinite pronouns for what they are, because t...

Interrogative pronouns (what, which, who, whom, whose) k...

Expletive pronouns (it, there) are less profane than they sound, stepping into a sentence as subject when the juice of the sentence lurks in the predicate:

Reflexive pronouns (myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves) allow a person or thing to be both the subject and the object of a sentence

or add emphasis

First, though you should generally avoid reflexive pronouns, sometimes they are necessary for clarity, distinguishing, for example, in the following non-Shakespearean sentence, between two possible antecedents

But novices most often use reflexive pronouns when a personal pronoun would be simpler and more elegant

Second, indefinite pronouns give us special trouble, since it isn’t always clear which ones are singular and which are plural. Each, for example, is singular. Both is plural. None, though, can be either.

Use who when the pronoun is acting as a subject (Who is it?) and whom when it is acting as

an object (in For Whom the Bell Tolls, the pronoun is the object of the preposition for).

Use who whenever the verb form that follows could be wrapped in parentheses without changing the sentence: “the explorer who (he believed) had been up the mountain.”

Go ahead and use who when the pronoun starts the sentence:

But whom can sound overly formal at the beginning of a sentence, so for a more colloquial tone, even this grammar diva will sing her tune with who.

The choice of an I or a you can affect the feeling of a passage.

Pronouns keep style succinct, allowing us to skirt the needless repetition of other words.

pronouns also establish the voice of the narrator.

In the most common point of view in fiction, the third person omniscient, the author is allowed to see into the heads of characters and to relay their thoughts to readers without necessarily being a character in the story.

In the close third person, the narrator is inside the head of one character only, relaying his thoughts or feelings.

In nonfiction, the third-person point of view is not so much omniscient as objective. It’s the preferred point of view for reports and research papers. It’s also best for business correspondence, brochures, and letters on behalf of a group or institution.

A final third-person pronoun deserves mention: one. This is the most removed of all the personal pronouns, and it can work as an all-purpose replacement regardless of whether the antecedent is male or female.

Joan Didion

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasion—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.

“Only presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms ought to have the right to use we.”

The second-person point of view gives Kael’s reviews urgency and intimacy.

The longer the work, the harder it is to carry off the second-person point of view.

Taking advantage of pronouns as a literary device is not a light undertaking: when we choose a point of view, we must make sure it’s true—appropriate to the story being told. Does the presence of the writer in the story add critical color, perspective, and insight? Or is I just evidence of a novice writer, or a little too much self-indulgence?

When pronouns play the role of subject in a sentence or clause, they appear in the subjective, or nominative, case (I, you, he, she, it, we, you, they). When pronouns play the role of objects—of a verb or of a preposition—they appear in the objective case (me, you, him, her, it, us, you, them).

Speaking of whose, the one truly unforgivable sin that haunts the use of pronouns is the confusion of whose with who’s and its with it’s. Pronouns, when they get possessive, act weird. We do not say I’s, you’s, he’s, or she’s to indicate possession, so why would we write who’s or it’s? Possessive pronouns are all apostropheless: my, your, his, hers, its. Who’s

and it’s are contractions of who is and it is (or who has and it has). Learn this or die.

Keeping pronouns straight is to the writer what keeping a firm hand on the tiller is to sailing. If your pronouns drift away from their antecedents, your entire meaning will get lost at sea.

hoi polloi

FICTION WRITERS CAN PLAY quite a bit with pronoun use to create characters or establish a narrator’s voice. But playing with point of view is really the province of poets.